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Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth were filming a movie about Eric Lomax’s life at the end of his road, but he was far too frail to go to the set.

Kidman and Firth went to his house instead and visited with him. It energized him so much that he was carried in his wheelchair and made it to the set that day.

Lomax died before the premiere of TheRailway Man, based on a book of the same name that he wrote.

His wife, Patti Lomax, played by Kidman in the movie, made it to the Toronto International Film Festival, where she told reporters about how her husband’s story made it first to the page and then to the screen.

A British soldier during the Second World War, Eric Lomax was captured by the Japanese and forced to work as a labourer on the Thailand Death Railway. He later met his captor, who his wife hunted down to help free her husband’s soul from the torture he endured.

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Lomax wrote some of what happened to him down on paper, but his notes sat in a drawer until he started going to counselling many years later. His counsellor told him it could be therapeutic to write his experiences down and a book was born.

“The fact that Eric could rise above himself and meet this awful person, in his mind, that he had been haunted by for all these years, we looked upon it as being therapeutic rather than something that would be taken up by other people,” Patti Lomax said Saturday at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Before his book, many of the stories from the Death Railway had been ignored. Firth, for example, never learned about any of them in his history classes at school.

Many of those men, screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce said, were too traumatized to speak about what they saw and experienced. And people didn’t want to hear bad stories.

“We won the war. We didn’t want to hear stories about defeat and surrender,” Cottrell Boyce said.

Firth told The Canadian Press there was a “huge amount of pressure” in portraying Lomax and “I haven’t had any experience which is equivalent of this.”

“You feel a responsibility to be as truthful as you can,” Firth said. “It’s not a straightforward thing to fulfill because we’re not following the facts exactly as they were, we’re not following the details exactly as they were because it’s impossible. This is a story that unfolds over 50 years, 70 years now, and we have 90 minutes.”

Firth also said that, “If the characters you’re playing, if they exist and you form a personal relationship with them, it becomes personal. It’s no longer just the case of a job to be done.

“This is a long storytelling process . . . it’s on behalf of an awful lot of people who weren’t able to speak out, that didn’t have a voice and that still haven’t been heard.

“You just want to be absolutely sure that you don’t drop the baton, that you don’t compromise how well this story has been told up to now,” he added.

Patti Lomax hopes people learn from her husband’s story to let go of old anger and stop the past from letting you live today.

“No matter how bleak life might be, there’s always a way forward if you’re open to see it,” she said.

“You have to let these things go, one way or another. That is the legacy that my husband has left, more than anything else.”

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